Genoa, London and Paris.

The practice called Renzo Piano Building Workshop, usually shortened to RPBW, carries the full name of its founder followed by two plain words. The practice says on its own website that it was established by Renzo Piano in 1981, with offices in Genoa, Italy, and Paris, France. English Wikipedia gives the same founding year. The practice’s biography of its founder says Piano was born in Genoa into a family of builders, and English Wikipedia says that family firm was called Fratelli Piano and was later led by Piano’s brother Ermanno.

The workshop did not appear from nothing. The practice’s biography says that while studying at the Politecnico di Milano, Piano worked in the office of Franco Albini. In 1971, it says, he set up the Piano & Rogers office in London with the British architect Richard Rogers, and the two won the competition for the Centre Pompidou in Paris. English Wikipedia says the pair worked together from 1971 to 1977, that the competition entry was made in collaboration with the Italian architect Gianfranco Franchini, and that the building in the Beaubourg district opened in 1977. Wikipedia describes a building whose structural frame and heating and air-conditioning ducts sit on the outside, painted in bright colours, with an escalator in a transparent tube running across the façade.

After Paris came a second partnership. The practice says that from the early 1970s to the 1990s Piano worked with the engineer Peter Rice, and that the two shared the Atelier Piano & Rice from 1977 to 1981. English Wikipedia says that after ending his collaboration with Rogers in 1977, Piano established offices in Genoa with Rice, and that one of their early projects was a plan for the old port of Otranto. The Building Workshop name followed in 1981. Where the earlier offices paired two surnames with an ampersand, the new name put a single founder’s name in front of the words Building and Workshop, words that describe making rather than a firm of partners.

A studio above the sea.

The practice has two addresses in its own account of itself, one in Italy and one in France. In Genoa, English Wikipedia says, Piano designed a headquarters for the Renzo Piano Building Workshop between 1989 and 1991 on a series of stepped terraces above the Mediterranean, west of the city, reached by a small funicular railway car. The practice says the Renzo Piano Foundation, set up in 2004 to promote the architectural profession through educational programmes, established its headquarters at Punta Nave, near Genoa, in June 2008, and Wikipedia says the foundation shares that site with the architectural office.

The buildings that have carried the Workshop name can be read as dated facts. English Wikipedia dates the Menil Collection in Houston to 1981–1987, the Kansai International Airport terminal in Osaka to 1994, The New York Times Building in New York to 2007 and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens to 2016. In its home city, Wikipedia records the redevelopment of Genoa’s old port, including the Aquarium of Genoa in 1992.

In London, the practice designed the tower beside London Bridge station. Channel 4 News reported on 5 July 2012 that the Shard, designed by Renzo Piano, was opening that day on the south bank of the Thames, with the Duke of York among the guests and a laser show across the city. The broadcaster said the building’s name, which had since become its formal name, came from Piano’s own description of the project as “a shard of glass” during the planning stages.

In New York, the practice designed a new home for the Whitney Museum of American Art. Dezeen, in an article by Amy Frearson published on 23 April 2015, said Piano had completed a nine-storey steel and concrete building in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, between the Hudson River and the High Line. The magazine credited Renzo Piano Building Workshop as design architects, with Cooper Robertson as executive architects, and said the museum would open to the public on 1 May. Dezeen quoted Piano saying the design had emerged from many years of conversations with the Whitney.

A founder, two offices and a workshop name.

An architecture practice rarely sells a product off a shelf, so its identity lives in a handful of recurring surfaces. The first is the name itself. Many practices are named after their founders, and the way those names are joined says a good deal: a plus sign, an ampersand, a comma or a plain run of surnames each sets a different tone, and a change of partners often means a change of name. Initials and acronyms do similar work, compressing several people into a short mark that fits on a drawing title block.

The second surface is the published work. Monographs, exhibition catalogues and the practice’s own books carry its typography, layout and image style into libraries and bookshops, often for longer than any website. Models are a third surface: the material, scale and finish of a presentation model become part of how a studio is recognised. The fourth is photography of finished buildings, where the choice of photographer, framing and light repeats across press kits, websites and lectures. For a design guide, these surfaces show how a practice keeps a consistent voice while its buildings differ in place, programme and material.

Partners, projects and a working name.

The name the practice uses for itself is long, and it is usually written as the four letters RPBW. The practice’s website is rpbw.com, its project pages carry the full name, and press credits use the full name too: Dezeen’s 2015 Whitney article listed the design architects as Renzo Piano Building Workshop rather than as Renzo Piano alone. The practice says on its website that it is led by a group of partners that includes its founder, and its people pages list Renzo Piano as architect and founding partner.

The word Workshop has stayed in the name since 1981. It follows the two earlier offices in the founder’s career, Piano & Rogers from 1971 and the Atelier Piano & Rice from 1977, each named with two surnames joined by an ampersand. In 1981 the partner’s surname gave way to a description of the work, Building Workshop, after the founder’s full name.

The practice lists current work on its website. It says ongoing projects include the Tokio Marine headquarters in Tokyo, a new campus for the Politecnico di Milano, the Kyklos centre for arts and cultures in Athens and the Waterfront di Levante redevelopment in Genoa. The list returns to the Politecnico, where Piano studied, and to Genoa, where the practice keeps its Italian office. English Wikipedia adds that the CERN Science Gateway, an education and outreach centre designed with the practice in Meyrin, Switzerland, opened in October 2023.

Paris remains a working city for the practice as well as an office address. English Wikipedia says Piano is working on a redesign of the commercial centre at the Tour Montparnasse, and that he spoke in 2026 about the reception of the Centre Pompidou after it opened and his hopes for the new project.

Across these years the practice has kept the same two office cities in its own description, Genoa and Paris, and the same five-word name. The name pairs a person with a way of working, and the building at Punta Nave, on terraces above the sea and reached by funicular, gives the workshop a fixed address.

For a design guide, Renzo Piano Building Workshop shows how a practice can keep its founder’s full name while describing itself with the plain words Building Workshop, and how a long name settles into four initials. Compare Foster + Partners, a London practice also named after its founder, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, a New York practice. For this guide we use harbour blue, slate and sail white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Renzo Piano Building Workshop’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.